It doesn't matter what the consumer wants. What matters is what operators and manufacturers want. There is no way manufacturers are going to get feedback from consumers on such complex things. All they get is sales numbers, but they have no idea why a certain product sells or not. That's why Blackberry added colour touch screens since they don't understand what the potential of their product is. They see Apple being successful with touchscreen phones and so also try touchscreen phones.

Of course you can always use the democratic aspect of capitalism and just buy a mobile phone company, and make them build whatever device you want.

It's an attempt to get the most "bang for the buck". Essentially you write lots of small programs which have limited and well defined functionality, then you hook them up any way you like. In fact taken to the extreme (as with Plan9) you can do anything with simple shell scripts.

BTW there are simpler developing environments out there which have a decent feature set, without the complexity of a C(++) toolchain. Lazarus is just one example of it. Of course you then loose flexibility. Lazarus, for example, is mostly suitable for GUI applications. Writing a webserver with it is hard. Of course it does GUI decently well, allowing you to have one codebase compiling from everything from your bog standard Linxux (GTK) over MacOSX, Android to even exotic platforms like Win32.

That's because those devices will, like "smart"-phones, cater to the lowest denominator. In the end you'll end up with a device that's hard to program, preventing "casual programming", while allowing malware via some store.

So far the closest thing I've seen to a smart watch was the HP-01.

I mean those devices are sold as "business mobiles". Yet the keyboard lacks all important keys. For example there are no modifier keys and not even an "Escape" key.

How are you supposed to use, for example Microsoft Word, on such a thing.

I mean it's obviously foolish to not get some proper education, and at companies you typically only learn how not to do it. A formal education can bring you the inspiration and time to become a decent programmer.

However, currently there is the rare chance of a second ".com"-bubble. Companies are hiring just about anybody and paying them insane amounts of money. It's like in that old documentary I've seen about Netscape where they all thought they'd be great... but if you look at the actual product you'll find that it's unacceptably bad, by any standard except for 1990s commercial software standards.

So, if you manage to keep your standard of living low, you can milk a company for the money. Then when it'll collapse in 1 or 2 years you can get some proper education.

Well first of all the usual stuff. It needs to be completely open source and have an open bootloader so there is a chance of security. It also needs to have rather simple code so it can be checked, as well as decent battery life.

Then there is the whole issue of user interfaces which isn't even solved for mobile phones these days. What you need is a powerful interface that works on small devices. So far the best contestant in that area seems to be the HP-01 calculator watch.
http://www.led-forever.com/htm...
It allows you to start a stop watch, and then use the result in real time to do calculations on it.

Unfortunately it seems like "smartwatch" manufacturers will go the other route, making them rather useless. Just like they already did with the idea of a "smartphone" when they turned it from something like the Nokia Communicator to something like the iPhone.

There is, apart from some clouds, nothing in between. Those are ideal conditions. Considering that even the radio links of the moon missions had a few megabits of channel capacity, that's not very much. (Yes those links were analog, but Shannon has showed that you can still express the capacity of such a channel in bits or shannons)

So you are still looking through a letterbox. This may be acceptable in situations where you need lots of width.

It's a typical "market research" product. People put 2 screens next to each other and complain about the bezel, a company realizes this and makes a "double wide" monitor.
People don't put 2 screens next to each other because they want to have just a wider screen. They do so because they want to have a larger screens. Putting screens on top of each other is, however, rather difficult. That's why they are put next to each other.

What people actually want is a large high definition screen. Ideally with more than 2000 pixels in height. That way you can put whole designs on your screen without having to constantly scroll and zoom around. Just imagine routing a wire on a board and being able to see where you're going.

I mean those people create _actual_ harm.
China cannot harm people outside China in any significant way, and should they ever do, your local government would at least protest. However no western government ever protests against the US... even when they abduct people.

China doesn't even run large sigint installations in Germany the way the US does.

To be honest I've never seen a capture card doing anything with the signal. I know the chipsets are capable of detecting it, but I've never seen it implemented in a driver.

Well, but a week long Exchange semi-outage still costs money, no matter what your support level is. (Happened at a large German manufacturer of household appliances) Microsoft software just doesn't seem to be enterprise ready.

So far the main advantage of BluRay is that you can get a HD copy at a reasonable price where you can actually get rid of the DRM in most cases. Currently this makes using a BluRay just as illegal as pirating the movie. If they would stop adding DRM, they would not only reduce the production costs (DRM is expensive!), but also give the customers what they want.

Yes, plus they want to be able to give out VHS copies to people. In fact some producers dubbed all their material to VHS to be able to have a portable editing station in their hotel room where they could do a rough edit. The final edit would be done on proper equipment, but they already got a feel for how it would look like.

Actually the "broadcast quality" equipment ran various forms of Betacam which only shares the cassette size with Beta. The closest thing ever promoted by Sony for actual broadcast use was U-Matic, an ancestor of Beta with 3/4inch tape. It came in Low Band, High Band and SP.

However as stated before, there's a professional market where quality doesn't matter, and that's where (S-)VHS came in.

VHS never was broadcast quality, however there's still a large market for professional non broadcast TV. For example companies would want to put internal information video on VHS since it's cheap and "good enough". For that market you get better (S-)VHS recorders.